Author: Regency
Title: The Stone River Maiden
Pairing: River/Eleven
Summary: The Doctor is traveling alone when he meets her. She is the Stone River maiden, hair all in curls. She is monochrome seduction in obsidian. He is in love before he turns away. He doesn't get to turn back.
Author's Notes: I thought it would be interesting if the Doctor fell in love with a weeping angel. Nothing more, nothing less.
Disclaimer: I don't own any characters, setting, or quotes recognizable as being from Doctor Who. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.
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He returns to her alone after each adventure. He doesn't bring Clara or her Caleb, Nerys or her Odo. This secret is his like the TARDIS is his ship. He will face his maid in her slow-rushing home. He will sit on the rocks and watch her obsidian flesh ripple in the arcing light of the moon and the sun. He will tell the lady who has withstood time his secrets, listening all the while to the confessions of nature around her. She has predated the trees, is governess to the grass and the five-finned piscines that ride the lackadaisical current from source at spring to ocean free.
He will not tell her how he's come to rely on her steady presence or how she has seduced him in her silence. But he will tell her goodbye as he goes, intending all the while to never return.
He will return every time.
…
He thinks of analyzing her makeup once, universal carbon dating where carbon is not the sum base of life. He would have to scrape her raw—only a sliver, mind!—and give up a piece of her hard-edged flesh to his ship for the testing. He wants to find out who created her and when, who left her here to guard the thriving world in her dotage. He thinks he'd like to ask after her inspiration; he thinks he'd like to shake their hand. But he can't bear to hurt her, not even a little, so he doesn't know.
Her stone face is covered by her stone hands, yet he is certain she must be beautiful underneath them. Although she never moves, now and then he thinks he sees her sculpted curls sway in the breeze. Would they be soft if they weren't stone? Would they be gold? He dreams they might be.
Dreams of her made warm and gasping are some of the nicer dreams he's been known to have.
...
She will not eat him whole, but he will be devoured all the same.
"Who are you?" he asks, sitting in his braces and bared feet at stream's bank.
"Your angel," she answers, nay, purrs, as she takes his hand and whisks him away.
Where she takes him, he's never been, but he would willingly go time after time, again and again just to be with her, for even a lonely god needs an angel.
The Doctor's hasn't been the passenger before. He thinks he might like the change.